When my daughters were young, I learned that if they went to a birthday party for a boy I didn't know well, a Bionicle was always a good gift. I did not know they were made by Lego. The toy line ran from 2001 to 2010, and again from 2015-2017. Bionicles were fictional characters, a type of action figure you built with small pieces that fit together. For a giveaway in 2001, the company manufactured 30 Kanohi Hau masks, which were special because they granted magic protective powers to Bionicles. The masks were an inch tall and made of 14-karat gold. Only 25 were given to the public.

Somehow, one of these rare Lego pieces ended up in a Goodwill store in Pennsylvania, donated in a bag of jewelry by someone who didn't know how rare they are. They listed the Kanohi Hau mask on the store website for $14.95, but quickly got offers up to $1,000 for it! They pulled the mask from the website and scrambled to find out what they had. The piece went up for auction in February and sold for $18,101!  

See, it pays to know what's in your toy box. Read about the journey of the $18K Lego piece at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Goodwill) 

Critics and moviegoers alike are singing the praise of Dune: Part Two. So far it's done better than the first part, released in 2021. How much of that praise is in contrast to the 1984 film, or the 2000 miniseries, is a question for another time. Still, dedicated science fiction fans know that it's not what the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert was, nor could it ever be.

That doesn't mean that Dune: Part Two isn't a great movie. In fact, it comes closer to the experience of the book than any other adaptation so far. But there still were choices to be made in translating an entire series of books that presented a new universe in a whole new way to a feature film, or even a series of features films. Nerdstalgic explains what was changed and what was left behind in bringing us Dune in its cinematic versions.   

The people of France suffered years of abuse, deprivation, humiliation, and terror under the Nazi occupation in the 1940s. When France was finally liberated, the citizens not only felt relief, but extreme anger over what had been done to them. After Allied armies defeated the Axis powers, years of pent-up anger was directed at those suspected of collaboration, especially women accused of "collaboration horizontale," meaning romantic or sexual relationships with the occupying Germans. In other words, sleeping with the enemy.

While a few were genuinely collaborating, many of these women cooperated with German soldiers to survive and feed their children. Some were prostitutes continuing their trade. Some were raped, or were otherwise under threat of their lives or their family's lives. And some didn't do anything at all, but were accused as a scapegoat or distraction from other war crimes. Some 20,000 of these accused women had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets of France by angry mobs to humiliate them. Read about the women accused of collaboration horizontale at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

The idea of Daylight Saving Time is that we give up an hour of sleep in the spring, and then get it back in the fall in order to enjoy sunlight into the evening through the summer. They say we'll adjust in a few days. But it's not as simple as that. Vanderbilt neurology professor Beth Ann Malow tells us that the effects of adjusting to an earlier clock in the spring has effects that last for months.

People disagree on whether standard time or Daylight Saving Time is preferable, but we all agree that the change (which happens tonight in most of the US) is a real hassle. The physiological effects of getting up an hour earlier every day include sleep deprivation that continues through the summer as later daylight messes with our melatonin production. The effects are especially egregious in teenagers and those who live on the western edge of a time zone. Those who live on the western edge of a time zone also have an increased risk of several types of cancer. But that's just a sample of the physical effects of changing our clocks in the spring (there's hardly any downside to setting our clocks back in the fall). Read more on the effects of Daylight Saving Time at the Conversation. -via Atlas Obscura

You've got five days to get ready for Pi Day (March 14). Besides ordering a Pi Day t-shirt from the NeatoShop, you'll want to prepare by memorizing 200 digits of pi. AsapSCIENCE helps by giving us a song that puts rhymes to the digits so you can learn them. Are you going to do it? Of course not! It's much easier to celebrate Pi Day by wearing a t-shirt and eating pie. I'm perfectly happy knowing just a few digits. But you will enjoy listening to this nerdy mathematical wonder set to the tunes of "Hall of the Mountain King" and "The Blue Danube." This is officially called "The Pi Song 2.0" because they did a song with just the first hundred digits five years ago. Apparently some of their fans actually memorized it and need a new challenge. The song is not that long, but they managed to make the completed video exactly three minutes and 14 seconds long. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Didn't we all use secret codes as children to send messages to each other that no one else would understand? Those codes were usually pretty easy to launch and to break, and sometimes even involved a magic decoder ring found in a box of cereal. But some codes and ciphers took vast teams to solve, or remained secret for hundreds of years. It's pretty hard to solve a code when the person who designed it is long dead, and the you don't even know what the original language might be. Yet the right person with the right skills can do it. In this video, we learn the stories behind nine famous codes that were once considered unbreakable intil someone figured them out. They include the Enigma code, Linear B, the Purple code, the Vigenère cipher, the Zodiac killer's cryptograms, the Copiale cipher, the Voynich manuscript, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's letters, and Edgar Allan Poe's ciphers, which turned out to be the least important of them all.

When Dune: Part One premiered in Venice in 2021, Zendaya wore this unique and flattering designer gown. It looks soft, but it's made of leather. They actually made a cast of her body to form the dress. She had difficulty sitting in it, and spent the entire evening focusing on breathing.

That's a common story. When you see celebrity women on the red carpet or some other high-profile event, they are wearing one-of-a-kind fashions that make the wearer look good for pictures, even when the dress itself is ugly. What you don't see are women lying down backstage because they can't bend to sit, or fainting from not being able to breathe, or nursing the bruises on their feet when the evening is over. These women project the appearance of bodies we all wish we had, but it comes at a cost. Read 16 stories of celebrities that endured unnecessary pain to look their best on camera at Buzzfeed.  

We've all heard the story about the discovery of coffee, when an Ethiopian goat herder noticed his goats frolicking energetically after consuming coffee beans. Once the goat herder shared his discovery with the local monastery, there was no turning back. We don't know whether there's any truth to the legend, but we do know that coffee consumption began in Ethiopia. It was consumed in several ways. I sometimes distinguish coffee from tea in conversation by referring to one as bean water and the other as leaf water, but some early coffee was made by brewing the leaves of the coffee plant! The more fascinating story is how the beverage took over the world, and that history is documented. After all, what's better than a beverage that makes you happy without making you do stupid things you'll regret tomorrow? This TED-Ed lesson from Jonathan Morris follows the rise of coffee as both its flavor and its caffeinated effects got the entire world hooked.

Grandpa will always tell you about "the blizzard of __," of which you kids have no concept. I tell my kids about the ice storm in February of '98, when the electricity was out for two weeks and we had to sleep in the kitchen after we burned all the wood we could find. Yet personal memories are nothing compared to scientific measurements and news stories. The end of the 19th century was particularly bad for blizzards in the US, but some of the most deadly blizzards happened elsewhere. In 1972, 26 feet of snow fell in southern Iran. Yes, feet. That happened as the country was undergoing a years-long drought! Around 4,000 people died, many of them frozen to death inside their homes. In 2008, blizzards killed hundreds of people in both Afghanistan and China. But the US still has more blizzards than anywhere else. As we approach the beginning of spring, look back at ten of the worst blizzards in recorded history at Mental Floss.

When people really want to do something, they will find a way around the law. America found that out in a spectacular way during Prohibition in the 1920s, so much that we rescinded the 18th Amendment by passing the 21st Amendment. Alcohol consumption is still regulated, more so in some places than others, but there are plenty of legal loopholes. If you restrict liquor sales to restaurants, suddenly all bars become restaurants. If you can only make wine at home for personal consumption, there will be plenty of folks willing to sell you the instructions, the tools, and the "materials" used to make it. When the only way you can get booze is by prescription, doctors will write them freely for friends and important people. You get the idea. Read about six of these clever loopholes people have exploited in their quest to wet their whistles at Cracked.

(Image credit: Przemek Pietrak)

A "title drop" is when the name of the movie is said in the movie's script. When it comes, it can seem momentous or awkward or, on a few occasions, even natural. You know that some movies don't have a permanent title when shooting begins. Sometimes a good line becomes the title instead of the other way around. But it often seems forced.

Dominikus Baur and Alice Thudt analyzed 73,921 movies going back to 1940 for title drops. Only about a third of them have a title drop in the actual movie dialogue, so that's 26,965 movies. They identified 277,668 title drops, which is an average of more than ten per movie! But... some movies are extreme outliers, like Barbie, which says the word "Barbie" 267 times. That makes up for many movie like The Fellowship of the Ring, which has those words exactly one time. Documentaries and biopics tend to have a lot of them, because they are often named for the subject. It's the same for fictional movies named after the main character.

But the deep dive into the data of title drops goes much deeper. What are the highest rated movies with title drops? Where do those drops occur? In which decade are title drops most common? What are the longest title drops? (Hint: it's 17 words long!) There's even a searchable database so you can look up your favorite movies and find out if and where it has a title drop. -via Metafilter

Rumors, gossip, disinformation, and conspiracy theories are nothing new. People have a tendency to believe the most outlandish things, particularly when they are fearful, such as during wartime. In World War II, Axis powers did their best to spread fear and disinformation among Allied countries, even those on the home front in America, far from the battlefields. But Axis propaganda was greatly supplemented by the homegrown rumors that spread among civilians. At least back then, they spread more slowly without the internet. Some rumors were about the war itself, about fictional defeats and secret missions that destroyed morale. Others were plain disinformation, such as the one that urged people to destroy their victory gardens. And many of these rumors blamed the evils of wartime on oppressed groups, exploiting existing prejudices.

American newspapers and magazines fought back against these rumors by publishing what they called "rumor clinics," in which they revealed rumors and fact-checked them. The federal government used a different tactic, as they believed even printing the rumors would spread them. Federal authorities instead just published the facts without repeating the rumors themselves. Information to combat disinformation, in other words. Read about the rumor clinics that attempted to set the record straight at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration)

Who is the most illogical person to portray a superhero? The same person who portrayed Arnold Sharzeneggar's twin brother, Danny DeVito, so why not make him an an X-man? Corridor Digital edited DeVito's character Frank Reynolds  from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia into the world of the Wolverine movies. Contains NSFW language and partial nudity, but that's from the TV show, not the movies! His origin story is included, and Frank reacts about the way you'd expect him to. It works well, but you have to wonder about the mind who came up with this idea in the first place. It had to start with one realization while listening to the dialogue of It's Always Sunny, and then led to excruciating research to find more places to use DeVito's character. -via Born in Space

Do you know where your state or hometown got its name? Or the original meaning behind it? Some have pretty wild stories. Manchester is a name that means "breast-like hill," but you might not find such a landmark in New Hampshire because that city was named for the city in the UK, where there was such a hill when it was founded as a Roman fort in 79 CE. Kansas City was named for the Kansas River, which was named for the Kanza people, which means "people of the South wind." And Kansas City, Kansas, was named after Kansas City, Missouri, even though it's in Kansas state. And speaking of Kansas, Topeka means "a good place to dig potatoes."

WordTips looked up and researched the history and the meaning of all 50 US states, plus each state capital, and for good measure, 179 of the country's biggest cities. You can enlarge the above map of the state and state capital names at WordTips. You'll also find maps of the major cities by region with their name meanings, and read some of the better stories, too. While many place names came from Native American languages, some place names were appropriated then re-translated. Honolulu was originally called Ke ʻAwa O Kou (the harbor of Kou), but British Captain William Brown named it Fair Haven when he arrived. It reverted to the Hawaiian language, but kept Brown's impression by becoming hono (port) and lulu (calm). My hometown was named after the guy who founded it, but hey, it's still a story. -Thanks, Taylor Tomita!

The 96th Academy Awards will be announced this coming Sunday night, March 10. There are ten films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and Screen Junkies has a word to say about each one of them. They are not necessarily good words, but it is SFW. You can tell when they really like a movie, yet they can always find something to poke fun at.

There are only nine entries, because Barbie and Oppenheimer are combined into one, as they are essentially the same movie with a different tone. While I haven't yet seen any of these movies, there is a big chasm between the ones I've written about enough to feel familiar with and those I'd never heard of before the nominations were announced. The short vignettes on the Best Picture nominees are followed by a few quick supercuts of what they have in common, and an inexplicable segment about The Beekeeper.